I have never been particularly good at leaving mysteries alone.

More than once, I have found myself standing beside a rock formation, stretching my arm into a narrow crevice with a camera in my hand, taking photographs of places I couldn’t actually see. There was no guarantee that anything was there. Most of the time I had no reason to believe there was. But I wanted to know.

What was hidden in the shadows?

What was around the bend?

I suppose I have always been that way.

People sometimes ask why I hike, why I pull off the road at historical markers, why I wander through ruins, old cemeteries, forgotten mission churches, and dusty back roads across New Mexico. The answer is rarely the destination itself. It is curiosity.

A crooked tree catches my attention because I want to know what shaped it. A faint trail disappearing into the trees makes me wonder where it leads. A weathered inscription carved into stone invites questions about the person who stood there before me. Every landscape feels like a story waiting to be told.

As a historian, I spend much of my life asking what happened here.

As a writer, I ask what might have happened here.

As a photographer, I simply stop long enough to notice that there is a question worth asking.

The older I get, the more I realize that curiosity has guided much of my life. It led me back to graduate school. It led me to write novels after decades of thinking about stories. It leads me down trails, through archives, and into conversations that challenge what I think I know.

Curiosity is rarely about certainty.

It is about possibility.

The bend in the road has never frightened me. If anything, it has always felt alluring. Not because I expect treasure on the other side. Not because I believe every journey ends somewhere extraordinary.

I simply want to know.

What is over there?

What story is waiting to be discovered?

What have I not seen yet?

The world has spent my entire life whispering those questions.

And I have rarely been able to resist following them.

Perhaps that is why I still find myself stopping at old ruins, wandering unfamiliar roads, and pointing cameras into places I cannot quite see.

The possibility that there might be something interesting around the bend has always been enough.

And more often than not, there is.